A memory from Yellowstone, summer 2007

Prescript: This trip to the park the summer before we all graduated was one of the most liberating and awesome experiences of my life. In particular, I bonded with my good friend Tana, a strong and humble woman who startles and delights with her laugh and the sharpness of her mind. It was also, in many ways, a study in the sort of solitude Thoreau wrote about, yet with a tinge of palpable loneliness, a loneliness one only explores fully through exposure, to an elemental sort of journey, whatever that may be.

One day, Tana and I had had enough. In the park, we tended to spend most of the day in uncharacteristic idleness: After scoping for the Granite Creek pack all morning (beginning at 4 a.m.), our group rode in silence (a quietude born of sleepiness at times, yet at other times, possessed of an audible reflective quality) back to our cabins, where nearly everyone went straight back to bed.

This particular day was shaping up to be hot, dry, cloudless; the sun, at this altitude, was all the more intense for the five to six hours of early morning chill we had endured on trailsides, in pullouts, hunkered down over our long-range scopes, straining with naked and tired eyes through binoculars, trying to spot our wolves in the dewy, hazy mountains. The leader of our expedition, our graduate poetry professor Jonathan Johnson, having made this excursion into Yellowstone innumerable times, assured Tana and me that there was a quick, flat little trail following a streambed that would take us from a drop-off point right outside Silver Gate back into camp. The whole thing, he said, was no more than three miles long; for us, an easy, brisk walk rather than a true hike. Already we had hiked the 1 1/2 miles in to Trout Lake, just off the park road, stretching our legs, and we were ready for more.

And that, in retrospect, was the crux of it : In many ways, our subsequent adventure was the subconscious result of what we felt with chagrin we had lacked-isolation; we had not yet traversed Thoreau's 'howling wilderness'. Granted, this is difficult to achieve-being quiet in one's head-while sharing small cabins with other students, but it wasn't just the other people.

Tana and I agreed: this hike was needed in mind and in body, so while the rest of the group stayed in the van, heading toward hot showers and sleep, we let Jonathan drop us off near the supposed trailhead, located immediately to the left of the road. It was still early, and the last of the morning cold lingered in the shaded spots, tricking us into a feeling of the freshness of early fall when instead, it was high summer in the mountains. The trail was supposed to be marked, as nearly all trails in Yellowstone are, with the ubiquitous brown triangle, a white man marching across it. We walked up and down the left side of the road for a while, in the area Jonathan had indicated, but saw no such sign. The need to move off the road, away from this traveled area, started to take us both over, the as-yes minor strains of heavy packs and heavy sun and hot clothing amplified by the same restlessness that had catalyzed our decision to hike at all. The closest feeling to it, I think, was that of waiting for a day to give way into another, as if by turning the calendar's pages over we might reach one that was blank, a place of rest.

Instead of giving up and taking the park road back into Silver Gate, we crossed the road. Our first mistake was in reading the topographical trail map wrong. Perhaps, though, we once again succumbed to an unconscious desire, one being communicated between us: the desire to invoke a challenge, the sort of risk one takes without expressing it, staying out just an hour too long in the cold, a touch to a hot surface, when long ago we should have learned that lesson, about how feeling a quick, sharp pain often uncovers so much more. So, through naivete or through the influence of will, we scanned the dirty, plastic-encased map briefly and decided to chance it. I recall distinctly thinking that we were certainly headed in the wrong direction, but ignoring it. We took the path anyway.

Adversity is a strange companion. We immediately began to climb, although Jonathan had insisted our trail started out flat. The starting altitude listed at the trailhead-roughly 6,000 feet-gave way to a rocky and narrow path, so that for the first portion of the hike we were forcibly making our way up on an angle. Tana led, her longer legs taking the strain of stepping up and forward from toehold to toehold better than mine could. And we talked. At first our conversation was lax, brief-we dissected the long van rides, our classmates, the upcoming school schedule, next fall...all quickly, jovially clinical: we were on an adventure, far from it all, and at first we were elated. It took nearly 30 minutes for the sounds of the park road below to disappear and I felt the quietude as a gradual easing, as if into cold water, one sense at a time growing accustomed to it until it is barely noticeable, not even there. After an hour or so, however, a shift in both our paces occurred. Having crossed a long stretch of tree-line, we came into full sun. We had started out around 10 a.m., and it was now high noon, the heat of it evoking what happens in Westerns, a sense that with the sun hot upon us, and no shelter in sight, this was the hour at which one begins to be honest, and must surely perish of it.

We were, too-honest, that is, but not about the lingering idea that we should turn back. As the heat built and we climbed further still, we talked more. I knew Tana had had a hard life, but, in the way one has when faced with only fragments of another's hardship, I had put that sense of her away, choosing to label her amorphously: 'strong', 'hardworking', 'a great lady'. Too wrapped up in the details of my own life to ask about hers. It was as if the ever-growing discomfort of our sweating faces and tired feet and laden backs became its own purgatory, brining out of us the same progressive discomfort.

She talked about her divorce, her daughter. Her fear that she'd not done right, by either of them.

I talked about the baby, the boyfriend. I talked about how I'd cried.

Our conversation turned, at the same time the trail did, downward into shadows, and there was no sound around mechanical enough to drown it out.

Yellowstone Park, in the summer, teems. It is not quiet, nor a haven for those seeking solace in 'true' wilderness, or merely to be away from men. From the very first day, although surrounded by huge pines, lakes fringed with tall grass, or sharp peaks, all necessarily spots one might assume peace is found, we had not yet had occasion to truly take in the experience of those things, to feel the great and welcome loneliness that one hopes to feel when confronted by the overwhelming smallness of being sentient in this place. Every morning we piled into the van, and for hours on into the day, we clustered around our equipment, flanked by dozens of other wolf watchers and tourists. To be alone, of course, is always a state of mind, and with so many other people at odds with each other's space, it was, until now impossible to achieve. I thought of this as Tana and I came out of the trees and into a clearing bordered on one side by thicket-the remnants of the trees we had come from, and on the other, by an endless, open bowl full of yellowing, rustling grasses. We had climbed far enough to reach the peak of our side of the mountain, and now stood in its cradle, the distance between one summit and another spannable by our strides if we chose, and the loneliness in both of us was palpable then.

Tana moved away, presumably to look for a good place to cross the creek in front of us, which at this time was low, dry, a simple waterway rather than a raging river. I stayed. Here, too, was the center, the height and distance of it separating us from the park, with its roads and hordes of people. Here too was ebullience: what perhaps we had both acknowledged wordlessly was a need for the lightness of being singular in a world of sensory pluralities, our personal griefs at last our own, without cacophony, to dwell for a moment on how we could be so simultaneously in awe of this place and sorrowful for it. Tana crossed the stream ahead of me, and then we were up and into the grassy elevation before us, and there were no birdsongs, no animals about, and the only breath for those miles was ours, and I felt the quick and undeniable advent of the sadness I was carrying with me, but what did that matter to the grass or the cloudless sky, and where else did I have to put it but back inside of me?

We finally decided, halfway between the peaks, dry grass shattering under our feet, to turn back. We knew camp lay the opposite way; we had not, until the sudden weariness, cared much. From that point forward, retracing our steps, we spoke of redemption. Of what it means to learn that to forgive is not necessarily the way. Of how we had seen, two mornings before, an old, old coyote crossing a buffalo wallow full of rain, right in front of us. He loped to within feet of the van, big paws raising the dust, tongue out, and looked us all over just once, as if to tell us that he knew for whence he was headed, that when he got there, he would lie down to die. I am ready, he seemed to be saying, and was just as quickly gone. Of what it meant to run away while still looking back, pillars of salt, the penalty for attempting to remember. It stayed brutally bright and warm the whole way back across the field, the heat beating in around us without making a wave in the still, thin air.

A little over halfway to the place where the trail finally started to level off, we paused for a moment on a bed of scree, a cascade of rocks and jagged edges left by a rockslide. As Tana clanked around in her pack, she scared up a huge figure: wide, squarish head, wings the length of our bodies and spanning the breadth of the trail. Silent. He crossed the path ahead of Tana, still bent over her pack, and never before had I felt so swallowed up by the presence of another moving thing, the wingspan of him, the complete lack of disturbance in his passing. There had been not a single sound, nor a change in the stillness of the trees, and if I too had been distracted, he might have escaped unseen. He lighted on a pine, this great horned owl, surveying; we worked in negation to him: heed nor fear nor even curiosity were in him. For all our grueling trek, our mental anguish, to this owl we were still merely obstacles on the path, as loud and bumbling and needy as any other animal, and just as easy to dismiss. He watched us for a short while from one pine before moving to the next, and we were stunned in his absence.

Once off the scree, we doggedly began the walk back to Silver Gate. The pavement was unwelcome to our feet, accustomed as we had become to the terrain in the mountains, the distance between us and camp nothing now, given what we had already come through. Our pace quickened a little at the entrance to camp, determination all that was left now that we had stood in the face of a lingering, separate grief in between the peaks.

"What took you guys so long?"

Incredulity: Jonathan pulled out his old trails map, and confidently announced that, all told, Tana and I had hike nearly 15 miles that day, and had ranged in altitude from 6,000 feet at the trailhead up to almost 10,000 feet at the summit. There was a fire in camp, bottles of wine, hot food; somewhere miles away our owl was still winging from tree to tree, and we had stood in our singular loneliness, been taken over by it, had returned. We called ourselves the warrior women. We still are today.